


he'd kill ten thousand people (with a sleight of his hand)

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-13
Updated: 2012-01-13
Packaged: 2017-10-29 11:32:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/319423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moran considered slamming the door in the man’s face just because he looked too suspicious, too respectable to be standing on the doorstep of a man who carved holes into people’s heads for money, but then he’s quietly introducing himself as Moriarty, <i>the Moriarty</i>, and Moran is opening the door a bit wider, standing off to the side to let the Professor step softly inside Moran’s dimly lit home. He’d only heard bits and pieces, murmurs and whispers and embellished tales of the mastermind that now sat on the fraying couch, a cup of weak tea balanced on his knees, dark eyes staring straight through Moran, but he knew enough that closing a door on Professor James Moriarty is the very opposite of a spectacular idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	he'd kill ten thousand people (with a sleight of his hand)

**Author's Note:**

> okay. here’s the deal. I haven’t read the books in a very long time and I started writing this the evening after seeing _a game of shadows_ in the theaters (technically for the second time) without doing any research into whether there was (or was not) any pre–written and/or talked about childhood/past of Sebastian Moran. I didn’t decide to _actually look him up_ until I had already written almost 1,000 words and I was in love with what I had put on paper (so to speak). turns out, there’s a whole wikipedia page on the guy, which kind of left me between a rock and a hard place. on one hand, what I had written – for the most part – didn’t specifically negate anything that already existed about him but, on the other, I could still get people yelling at me for, in a sense, re–writing his past. I supposed, then, that I could claim I was writing for the movie version of him which may or may not hand me a Get Out of Jail Free Card when it comes down to it, considering that the movie was kind of a fluffed up and played-with version of the short story _[The Final Problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Problem)_. I figured that gives me some leeway to write a fluffed up and played-with version of Moran’s past. ...right? either way, I decided that giving up and not posting it or deleting and re–writing was idiotic so, in the end, I left it alone and let it finish. hopefully you’ll love it no matter what.
> 
> (I’ve read over it multiple times but who knows what stupid mistakes I might have missed. I will make sure to fix them in due time.)
> 
> ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It’s not really like anything else, Moran thinks, the first time he properly shoots, the small animal tumbling gracelessly from the solid branch, high in the old, diseased tree that grows, all gnarled and emaciated in the very back of his childhood home. He had borrowed the scratched rifle from underneath the floorboards, a creaky spot next to his father’s bed, a place Moran wasn’t supposed to know about but discovered one afternoon when he laid, hidden, under the same bed, inhaling a stolen cigarette. He’d stared at the slender machine, eyes wide and watering for what seemed like hours, just staring until the cigarette had singed his mouth, the ashes tasting sour and hot on his tongue.

He teaches himself when his father’s working, standing on the back steps, just aiming and pretending to fire, making the sounds of explosions under his breath, his long arms aching with the weight, threatening birds and rodents and the old, deaf, hunchback woman who lived next door. At the sound of heavy boots on dirt and pavement, he’d scramble back indoors, shoving the rifle back in it’s hole, turning it this way and that until it matched the outline of dust.

The first time sends him tumbling backwards, the explosion and kick bruising his shoulder and leaving a ringing deep in his ears, the cigarette dropping from between his lips, left smoldering at his feet. He checks around but nobody pays him any attention and then he’s laughing, quietly, then louder. His hands tingle and itch and there’s a warmth low in his stomach that twists and bends. The animal was dead before it even hit the mud and Moran is already searching feverishly for his next target. He’d have to use the money he’d been carefully saving for his future to buy new bullets instead to replace the ones he’d used and he hoped to God that his father wouldn’t need the gun before then but, right at that moment in time, it didn’t matter.

– –

Moran asked his father one evening as they shared a tense dinner (sitting across from one another at the small wooden table the man had built by hand without an hour of sleep, two days after his wife – Moran’s mother – had been murdered) if he could learn to shoot, asking as if he didn’t already know.

His father threw his dirty fork at him, embedding it just enough in the boy’s chest to make it stick straight out and draw just the hint of blood.

Moran never brought it up again.

– –

He becomes known as the kid who could shoot anything and soon he’s taking other family’s well–earned money, brought to him by younger children with bright, curious eyes and curled hair, asking him if he could hit that from this distance or get this while it’s a few feet thrown into the air.

He does it, every time, just like they demand.

Soon, he’s got enough stuffed into pockets and drawers, hidden from his father, to buy himself his own gun. He seeks out the middle–aged man with the thick, twirled moustache behind the crumbling building just a few streets away from his own home and spends hours just inspecting, wasting time until he finds the right one.

– –

He compared the first time sharing a bed with someone else to the first time he fired that rifle. The only similarity was a warmth in his stomach but, even then, it was entirely different.

He figured he hadn’t done it right and tried with someone else.

He kept trying until found his way into the army.

When he fired that first, single shot into the enemy, watching them fall, dead before they even hit the solid ground, he adjusted his jacket with tingling hands, biting down on the end of his cigarette as he noiselessly laughed, letting the sound rise for only a few seconds.

A heat spread through him, churning around his abdomen.

He wrapped his finger around the trigger again and smiled.

It had been far too long.

– –

Coming home was like stepping back outside of his own head and he hated it, spent weeks holed up in his father’s house, pulling back drink after drink until he was numb, aching for a piece of metal in his hand and the spray of dark red across brown and grey because that was all he could do to shrug the cold that spun around him like dying flies.

He managed to pull himself together just in time for an old school friend to come knocking, tidy and nervous, sitting on the edge of a faded chair, explaining that he had gotten himself into trouble and had heard that Moran was clever, clean and quiet with a gun and that, maybe, he could help out, just this once.

Moran almost said no but, without the alcohol, the ache was nearly unbearable and the friend promised he would pay.

And that was enough, for now.

– –

Word, Moran discovered, travels fast.

People lined up at his front door every night or sought him out and Moran flashed back to his childhood, to the round faces of the young boys with their coins and slips of paper, filthy hands throwing bottles and animals in the air, waiting with baited breath for Moran to aim and _bang_ , glass shattering into their hair, small bodies with barely twitching paws coughing up dry dirt as it hit the ground.

The only difference now was the target.

– –

Moran considered slamming the door in the man’s face just because he looked too suspicious, too respectable to be standing on the doorstep of a man who carved holes into people’s heads for money, but then he’s quietly introducing himself as Moriarty, _the Moriarty_ , and Moran is opening the door a bit wider, standing off to the side to let the Professor step softly inside Moran’s dimly lit home. He’d only heard bits and pieces, murmurs and whispers and embellished tales of the mastermind that now sat on the fraying couch, a cup of weak tea balanced on his knees, dark eyes staring straight through Moran, but he knew enough that closing a door on Professor James Moriarty is the very opposite of a spectacular idea.

Moriarty explained that he’d like to hire Moran, possibly, full time, but that he’d have to test him first, just to see if he was both as reliable and as good as he was rumored to be.

Moran accepted because he didn’t think he was allowed to say no.

– –

When Moran finished, climbing down from the roof of the brightly lit building and into the hidden and waiting car of one James Moriarty, he folded his hands nervously in his lap, his gun laying at his feet, and asked:

“That was a test?”

Moriarty grinned as the wagon jumped and rumbled down the damp streets, a distant scream floating through the chilled air, a woman finding the body, bloody and collapsed on the stairs of the hotel.

– –

Moriarty teaches Moran how to play chess.

Moran knew already, taught before he discovered his father’s real weapon and let his interest in games that required sitting still fade into the very back of his mind. They’d sit at the small table, across from one another, dark liquor in his father’s hand and he showed Moran how to move the pieces across the splintered board and how to finish the game quickly and quietly, even if it meant losing, because “nobody wants to sit around with you for longer than they should have to.”

When Moran plays with Moriarty the first time, a rainy evening where the water slammed against the stone walls, thunder rolling, causing a soft buzzing in their ears with every crack and the lightening filling their mouths with the taste of copper, Moran did what his father told him, sliding pawns and knights around the board, not caring if this meant that he might surrender this time, if only to finish before an hour had slipped away under his feet. He watched his king, waiting for it to be knocked to it’s side with a mournful sound, but Moriarty never touches it, only quietly muttering the final words before letting his eyes linger on the board.

“Did you let me win, Sebastian?” Moriarty asked slowly, carefully, a hint of a smirk edging around his mouth. Moran looked up, grimacing, clutching his king simply because he’s not sure what else he could possibly do with his hands that wouldn’t get him into trouble (he had flipped the board once at the end of a game with his father when Moran had lost rather miserably and he recalled the consequences of those actions as being utterly alarming and a reminder to never let his temper take control in such a paltry situation again). He scratched a nail across the king’s wooden crown and shook his head. “Then,” Moriarty said woefully, “Whoever taught you how to play should be killed.” He paused, beginning to line the pieces back into their places. “I’ll make an assumption and say it was your father. He showed you speed but not strategy.”

“I was told that a game of any… marked length was not in my colleague’s interest,” Moran admitted, not adding the implication in his father’s earlier words.

“Your father was wrong, as most often are. While it is true that a lively game can be a remarkable one, without a proper strategy it’s worthless, and so is the person playing it.” They shared a few seconds of an awkward silence, a clap of thunder rattling the glass, wind whistling through a small split in the frame of a window. Moran held tighter to his piece, knuckles white. He’d been called that before – been called much worse as well – but it stings, just a bit more, to hear the word slip over Moriarty’s tongue. “Luckily, you seem to be the exception. There is some… promise. Line up your pieces, Sebastian, and listen to me.”

– –

It took over two months of instructions, of disorganized papers with Moran’s scrawl, lists of strategy and rules and numbers that Moriarty somehow taught him to understand, but, one late night, Moran finally won.

– –

Their first time, after Moran had returned from a job, after Moriarty had made him sit down and play chess, play the way that he – not his father – had coached him, locked away in Moriarty’s dark and silent room, Moran had expected the not–quite–right warmth, the finish that left him comparing, contrasting, _knowing_ that, in the end, it would never feel as good as he did when he put a rifle to his shoulder and let the very hole to hell slide open, an extension of his arm, for a mere split second.

He was surprised, tense, and lost when, after rolling over, chest heaving, the glow of orange light the only illumination around them, his hands began to prickle and something heated, boiling low, in the very pit of his stomach.


End file.
